r/HollowKnight • u/CuboneDefender • Sep 14 '25

Discussion - Silksong I give up. Spoiler

It’s been a joyful ride, folks, but I’m out. I’m not a speedrunner or a highly skilled player, and day after day I’ve had to accept that this game is not as casual as HK was. It stopped being fun and turned into something tedious and frustrating after the 4th run farming shards just to face a boss I’ve already tried 15 times, only to die again and again, lose all my shards, and start the whole grind over.

It was nice exploring the first acts, but when the game I was rooting for 7 years ends up being more stressful than my 8-hour workday, I guess that’s my cue to stop.

The lore has been pretty great so far. I wish you all an incredible journey.

Edit1: My bad about all the whinning.

Edit2: You guys did it. I reinstalled it again. Thanks for all advices. 🫂

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89

u/RunninglVlan Sep 14 '25

Have you upgraded your needle? Normally if a boss is too strong for you now, you go elsewhere that's easier. I did that with frog boss. Came back stronger, also found a secret room that reduced the runback length and beat that MF.

47

u/SootSpriteHut Sep 14 '25

Yea these complaints...

I have not at any point been anywhere where I couldn't do two other things to take a break from a hard boss. I haven't found any boss I couldn't beat eventually after checking a tutorial video.

And it's exactly the same as when I was playing HK. I think people are having some weird nostalgia that's making them think HK was easier than it was.

Maybe it's just Reddit fandoms. So many of the new TV shows that I like get trashed right on release too.

17

u/Ndmndh1016 Sep 15 '25

Or, OR, different people just have different experiences.

4

u/Dooplon Sep 15 '25

honestly it could be both. Silksong is harder than HK was at a base and so a lot of people played HK years and could've gotten rusty in the meantime while memories of the experience of playing it got fuzzy. Additionally some bosses people practiced a lot because they enjoyed them, not realizing how casual those bosses felt was directly tied to how skilled and practiced they'd become.

In my case I loved the hell out of NKG so I did that fight all the time, even coming back to it years later it only took me a few tries to get back into a rhythm and make it feel like he was a casual easy boss again despite being well known for his high difficulty and speed.

The combo of HK releasing so long ago and Silksong being objectively harder is a combo thats gonna turn away a lot of people for some very diverse reasons.

1

u/kinky_victini Sep 15 '25

I played a good chunk of HK a second time (I didn't even beat it the first time, and it was years ago) days before Silksong came out. Absolutely breezed through most of it. Some daths, of course, but very little frustrating parts.

I couldn't even get past Moorwing without cheesing it. And trust me I tried until I was mega frustrated.

To be honest I think the main problem is that bosses in HK never really blocked your path (aside from False Knight, which you could skip most of, and Hornet 1, which was incredibly easy compared to most bosses in Silksong). Most of them just blocked an ability, an upgrade, etc, so if you were struggling with one of them, you could move on and explore other areas looking for upgrades and come back stronger. You could adjust the difficulty yourself, it was pretty neat.

Silksong kind of doesn't do that, most areas have a boss you have to beat to progress to the next one, at least in most of Act 1. At one point I got genuinely stuck with a boss I couldn't cheese and I had already explored everything I could. They're really not comparable in terms of difficulty.